There is a long way to go between the first date and wedding. You need to engage and build a solid relationship. This level of engagement will define the maturity of your lead and their willingness to buy. Our job as a Media and Hubspot agency is to create the best journey to move your leads forward and ultimately convert them into customers.
"It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion than by doubling your traffic."
As soon as you have a new contact in your database, you should be starting to engage him/her. How to do so ? Well, let’s say the prospect clicked on an ad or searched on Google for a specific topic, found an article and converted by downloading an eBook. This prospect demonstrates an interest in the subject, but this doesn't mean he is ready to buy yet! And that’s the main mistake companies are making on and on !
Working on unqualified leads is just damaging the experience the prospect will have with your product or service and therefore your company. Plus, your sales team starts barking at your marketing team…
Thanks to technologies such as CRM & Marketing automation softwares, we connect your website, your database, your marketing channels and the sales CRM altogether to have a centralised and 360° view of the prospect interactions within your digital ecosystem.
With such a technological stack, you can adapt the way to interact and engage your prospect by personalising interactions and sending the right info, at the right time on the right channel, to make your prospect go forward in its journey. And at some point, he will be ready to buy.
In this phase, we will make use of landing pages, emailing, retargeting advertising, forms, chatbots, live chat and we will automate as much as possible the actions in order to make your marketing win a lot of time and offer a personalised experience to your customers.
This being said, one of the main challenges in the “engagement phase” is the conversion rate ! It is always a matter of tweaking small things fast, to improve the % of prospects that would convert on a website, landing page or email campaign. Experimentation is key to learning.
Marketing and sales have been working in silos for too long and still today they are too often misaligned. As business is becoming more and more digital, the trend today is to make them collaborate even more to achieve growth altogether. Indeed they are much more than the sum of their parts. The main difference is that marketing handles leads higher up in the funnel, whereas salespeople focus on the bottom half of the funnel. So they definitely complement each other but the challenge is how to ensure a smooth handover? And how marketing teams may be at disposal of the sales team for creating the right content pieces based on customers questions, interrogations & needs, as well as to pushing that content at the right moment for the prospects.
Once a lead has engaged with a piece of content or gave us his email address through a lead magnet for example, he will reach a specific score (lead scoring) until he is considered as a qualified lead. Automatically, the lead is sent to the sales team and it triggers a new workflow (automation). A deal is created in the sales pipe (CRM) and assigned to a sales person. Automatically, a task is created for him and a mail is sent to the lead with a calendar link for a demo. So basically, everything is automated until the sales meeting which can save a huge amount of time in terms of prospecting. The same workflow can also store all the historical data about a specific lead’s level of engagement within the CRM.
The very first step to create a connection with potential customers is to genuinely help them solve some of their problems. In order to do so, we promote special content to our audience so that we can start building a relationship and retarget them afterwards. As soon as a content has to be downloaded or exchanged against contact information, it becomes what we call a lead magnet. The leads are then integrated into your database so that you can directly get in touch with them through email from now on. Note that depending on the business model, this can also be done with a combination of outbound efforts where we advertise by pushing the information to your specific audiences.
The format of a lead magnet can vary from blog articles or video masterclass to chatbots or more complex engineered marketing among many others. It has to be adapted to both your business goals and audience. No matter the selected format, it has to comply with a few prerequisites to make sure you don’t push the wrong content.
Even if you comply with these prerequisites, it doesn’t mean you will have it perfect right away. We can share best practices and give our best gut feeling at DIGITAG but we can’t read the future yet. What we can do though is to track the engagement with your content and A/B test to optimise your lead generation.
Finding the right communication channel can be hard. New media are appearing all the time as technology enables richer interactions. Every day there are more and more options to promote your product and getting the combination is not an easy task. Is traditional media relevant for you? Should you rather focus on social media or use programmatic platforms? Can you rely on third party ambassadors? Are search engines still a viable option today? Your media mix will have to evolve and adapt during the overall customer journey. Now the question is how do you select your channels?
At DIGITAG, we conduct a permanent market watch to compare every option so that we can guide you through this process. We categorise the different channels based on several variables.
Once we have shortlisted the main channels, our goal is to start testing and measuring the return on investment for each single channel. This is also when we start integrating different media together to create a multi-channel approach.
